Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/409

380 thus acquainted with the lueaiiini^ of al)ut five hundred out of a vocaljularv which lie estimated as coiitainhiijf five thousand words. ^ These words, he explains, ' are ahnost all found eitlier in their full integrity or subjected to some slight modification in Assyriau '; and they enabled him 'to arrive at a pretty correct notion of the general purport of the phrases in which they occur/ Althout»'h his voca])ularv was still limited to one-tenth of the vocabulary, it embraced ' all the most important terms in the lanuuaLie ': and he found it sufficient for the interpretation of the historical inscriptions.

The present IMcmoir was intended simply, as intro- ductory to the subject, and he did not give a list of the one hundred and fiftv simis with their values attached. We cannot, therefore, institute a comparison as yet with the Syllalxirium already drawn up by Ilincks. It is sufficiently clear, however, that he had not, at the time of writing the MtMUoii-, realised the essentially syllabic* character of the lani2ua<re. There are, he savs, 'cases where a single alphal)etical power appertains to the siun/ and, he adds, ' it cannot certainlv be mahitained that the phonetic poi'tion of the alphabet is altogether sylla])i(*/ •• There is,' he observes, ' an extensive svllabarium: but at the same time manv of the characters can only be explained as single cimsonants.' There is no indication that he had as yet apprehended the princii)le that governs the c(mibinatiou of consonant and vowel, as recently expounded by Ilincks, and which is interwoven with the whole structure of the language. Indeed he says distinctly: 'I have lunther adopted, nor do I conceive it possible to adopt, any svstem with regard to the emplovment of the vowels in Assyrian and Babylonian.' In some other respects also he was still behind the ureat Ii'ish scholai*. Hincks, for

^ Menant, in 1S4, reports ,(X)U words, Ectiturcs^ x>. 25C.